The fool hath said “I can prove there is a God.”

Is there a nonsense than which nothing greater can be conceived than St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God? (The text of the argument is at the end of this blog).

According to this argument, nothing can be said not to exist if you give it the attribute of “than which nothing greater can be conceived”!

If you substitute the name Mickey Mouse or Scrapdoodle for that of God in the argument you get the same result.

An object “than which nothing greater can be conceived” cannot empirically exist – for how could we recognise the reality of such an object?

How can we conceive of a circle than which nothing greater can be conceived?

We are not told in what God’s greatness consists, then how can we conceive a greatness which has no attributes.

If his greatness consists, for example, in his omniscience:

a) how can we know that God knows everything
b) how can we know that there is no being more knowing than God?

The idea of an object in the mind has none of the real attributes of that object. Therefore, an object is not greater when it “exists in reality than in the understanding alone”.

Only a fool would infer that God exists from this argument. A fool such as St Anselm.

The Argument (taken from the Trinity University philosophy website).
1. God is something than which nothing greater can be conceived. (definition of “God”)
2. If someone understands the concept of God (i.e. the concept of something than which nothing greater can be conceived) then God “exists in the understanding” of that person. (definition of “exists in the understanding”)
3. It is greater to exist in reality than in the understanding alone. (More precisely: if x exists in the understanding but not in reality, and y is exactly like x except that y also exists in reality, then y is greater than x.)
4. The fool understands the concept of God (= the concept of something than which nothing greater can be conceived).
5. Therefore (from 2 and 4) God exists in the understanding of the fool.
6. Suppose for the sake of argument that God exists only in the understanding of the fool (i.e. not in reality as well). (This assumption will form the basis of a reductio ad absurdum.)
7. Then we could conceive of something exactly like what exists in the fool’s understanding except that it also exists in reality.
8. The entity that we conceived in 7 would be greater than the entity that exists only in the fool’s understanding (by 3)
9. But in that case what the fool conceived was not after all something than which nothing greater can be conceived (after all, we’ve just conceived of something greater).
10. So we have a contradiction! (Between 5 and 9)
11. So the assumption we made in 6 must be mistaken (since it led to a contradiction).
12. So God exists in reality. (6 was the assumption that God does not exist in reality; since 6 is mistaken, God does exist in reality.)